Dave Winer, 56, is a visiting scholar at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute and editor of the Scripting News weblog. He pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software; former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, research fellow at Harvard Law School, entrepreneur, and investor in web media companies. A native New Yorker, he received a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, a Bachelor's in Mathematics from Tulane University and currently lives in New York City.

"RSS was born in 1997 out of the confluence of Dave Winer's 'Really Simple Syndication' technology, used to push out blog updates, and Netscape's 'Rich Site Summary', which allowed users to create custom Netscape home pages with regularly updated data flows." - Tim O'Reilly.

While I'm on the subject of missing web services, here's another one I'm looking for -- and I'm fairly sure this one exists, and I'm interested in people's recommendations.

My mother put together a family photo album, which I scanned. So now I have a folder full of page images, and we want to go to work with with this material, but the family is distributed around the country. We're not going to sit around the kitchen table and do this in an afternoon. Rather, we're going to do it in our spare time, over a virtual kitchen table, over a period of months. It could be a very nice way to fill idle time, thinking about the past, and people we miss.

A venue for story-telling.

But right now what I have is a folder of images.

We need to do a bit of processing. Each page has several images. They need to be split up. And then there needs to be a place for a discussion.

It seems Flickr might be a good choice, but it doesn't have any integrated photo editing tools, does it?

I'm thinking of Picasa, but I don't like what Google is doing with all their products. What if my family photos become part of their kill-Facebook strategy.

And Facebook itself is out of the question. I don't have an account there, and plan to keep it that way.

What I want is a ticket-broker site that takes a query like the one in italics in the first line of this post.

I know some of the shows have seats open. But so far all I can find is a hunt-and-peck interface. I can ask about individual performances of individual plays. That's going to take forever. A service like Hipmunk or Kayak for plays. Now that would be nice!

If you know of such a service, helllp! If not, get busy.

PS: To be clear, all the services ask you to pick a play first, not a time. I only have certain times available. I want to know what plays I can buy tickets for at those times.

PPS: In the VRM world envisioned by Doc Searls, I would write a blog post like this one, and the offers would start streaming in.